A “foreign human rights activist,” whom neither Money Today or NoCut News seem to recognize, reportedly busted into the 2007 North-South Korean Summit Press Center in the Lotte Hotel this afternoon, causing something of a ruckus.
The activist was reportedly shouting that the intra-Korean summit was a lie, and that North Korean children were flooding into China and Thailand. He also carried with him literature on North Korean human rights.
Dr. V was eventually dragged from the premises by security personnel.
31 Comments
Good on Norbert. It’s made me want to vomit reading in the foreign and local media about the summit being about peace and reconciliation.
I sincerely hope Roh rots in hell.
I suppose you mean Dr. V carried with him literature on the lack of North Korean human rights. And why is it a foreigner had to disrupt this meeting instead of a Korean?
Just a question of access, boshintang. White dudes in their 40s or 50s from English-speaking countries can waltz in anywhere if they’re dressed right. He’s in business casual for this event, but with a necktie he could have had himself 3 more minutes of harangueing before they dragged him out.
I await the calls for his tasering. He was, after all, ‘being disruptive’ and perhaps even ‘didn’t obey the security guards immediately.’
Felonies both. ?
That’s not Dr V that’s Shane Warne.
http://network.news.com.au/ima.....551,00.jpg
He was probably just hogging the steak in the buffet.
I believe this is what the good doctor had in mind when he discussed “making a rainbow” at his recent RAS lecture: Adding a bit of rain to the South’s Sunshine Policy. Hope more’s acomin’!
When did Germany become an English-speaking country?
I am German living in Korea mow. My father did what he had to do: he escaped from the GDR Army. For almoust 30 years he could not see his family again. Everywhere where he saw communists, a red Mercedes with SU sign in Finland during the 80s for example, it was not easy to hold him back from smashing the car.
I grow up in West Germany, so we watched our politicians starting dialogue with Eastern Germany. Anybody remebers the Kohl-Honecker summit?
There was no V.
Props to Norbert V!
I’m just glad the picture doesn’t make him look like a lunatic or nothing.
PS: King Baeksu, love your stuff. Props to you, too.
Good on Norbert. And, yes, if he had been tasered, the security people would have been in their rights. But, I suspect he wouldn’t have snivelled about it, ir tried to paint himself as a martyr for free speech.
You sure about that?
http://english.yna.co.kr/Engne.....834E8.html
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=100
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=111
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=100
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=102
You mean like this?
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=102
Dr. V has developed something of a talent for getting dragged from places. Here he is today:
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=102
And here he is in 2004:
http://news.naver.com/news/rea.....enu_id=104
Say — or write — what you may about Norbert, at least he seems to have more of a set of balls than anyone I have ever met.
Yes, he may seem crazy to most people, but most people simply opine over beer — or over the Internet — and rarely make a genuine bit of difference.
In comparison, Vollertsen makes most people, including myself, seem like pontificating hypocrites in the face of unabashed depravity, only a short distance north of Seoul.
#12,
I couldn’t agree more.
Yep he talks the talk and walks the walk.
I applaud the message but not the method. Phaser settings on stun.
Note: unless those are plain clothes cops, they are security, not the police that tasered the young jackarse awhile back for not letting the police cuff him.
And it is a shame that a Westerner has to do what South Koreans should be.
Yep, good on him.
the dude’s heart is in the right place, clearly. but the guy’s a bit off. i mean, he’s got a few screws loose.
yeah, this publicity stunt was productive and helpful.
“The guy’s a bit off. I mean, he’s got a few screws loose.”
I have known Dr. Vollertsen since 2001 and he is quite normal, rational, sane and extremely well-mannered. He is not a nut, he is a hero.
What he is doing is called THEATER. There is a method to his apparent madness. Try to look beyond the skewed headlines and the unflattering pics, OK?
Personally, I find it interesting that he keeps getting visas to come back here, despite his long record here as a so-called troublemaker. Obviously, SOMEONE in authority wants him to be here — maybe because he is not afraid to do what many others here are afraid to do?
Would agree with the above. He is an exemplar of non-violent protest. Those who judge him as a nut while agreeing with his aims might want to reassess their level of commitment to the oppressed masses of the DPRK.
Whether he is nuts or not, he does give that impression sometimes. But, I have to say that his cause is just and I feel he is definitely sincere in his intentions. As a few others have noted, it would be nice if more South Koreans appeared to give a shit about their northern cousins as Dr. V clearly does.
While I certainly appreciate Dr. V’s enthusiasm, and I support his cause (and I agree with Mr. Coyner that he’a at least doing something), the tactics he uses may be doing more harm than good. His theatrics may be intentional, but they end up making him look like a foreign nutjob, and I’m not sure if that’s really the best way of winning hearts and minds. And things like going to right-wing meetings and calling for the overthrow of the elected head of state make me wonder about the advice he’s getting from the people around him:
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2004/.....oooorbert/
Foreigners have been doing the heavy lifting of everything considered even remotely controversial in Korea for more than a hundred years - and then getting cold-shouldered by their Korean “sponsors” when they manage to get their own snouts in the trough. As Richardson notes, it’s shameful.
People marry each other when they fall in love; they divorce each other when they run out of love. Some people never seem able to make that decision, even when they don’t like each other any more.
Robert, regarding your comment of him appearing as a foreign lunatic, how is that out of sorts with protest culture here in Korea? Methinks he would fit right in.
What is this guy trying to reveal that the world doesn’t already know? That there is a lack of human rights in North Korea?
So the answer to the issue of human rights in North Korea is to sanction North Korea, not engage in dialogue with them, and just be enemies? Well, that’s the way it’s been for more than 50 years and guess what? That didnt exactly help the human rights situation either.
Human rights is only one piece of a complicated picture. It doesnt exist in a vacuum, either. Read Fareed Zacharias. The existence of human rights requires a supporting infrastruture of civil institutions and a constitutional, liberal democracy, which takes years to develop. In order for anything like that to happen in a place like North Korea, the FIRST thing that MUST happen, way before anything else, is a glasnost-like detente between NK and the rest of the world. This is what many social-conscience fools like this fellow dont realize, that in order for human rights to grow in despotic regions, other things have to happen first. I have been saying this for years: reconciliation give hope to the possibility of human rights in the future. But without, you get neither human rights nor anything else.
I believe it is far better to engage in dialogue with North Korea than not. Hawks like to call this appeasement. They really need to stop making tired analogies between WW2 and today’s realities.
This doctor and his antics represents what has been the bane of modern Korean history: intrusive, unwanted foreign meddling in Korean affairs. He may be motivated by genuine emotional passion but it really doesnt help anything except cause trouble.
I’d be the first to admit that the intra-Korea summit is not without serious flaws. However, The primary motive of the SK government is to secure peace, security on the Korean peninsula and to introduce economic reforms to NK. Foreign, especially American, interests are loathe to see reconciliation whereby NK is no longer an enemy. I’d let thinkers figure out why that may be so.
You are exactly right, Netizen Kim.
It is much better to have a peaceful process which will lead to unification in the future than to have violent war which will get a lot of people killed on both side of Korea.
What most of the people, especially some of the westerners and their activists, don’t understand is that the people in the north and south are both Koreans. All they see is bad bad communist people north, good good democratic people south and lets have them fight and kill each other.
Netizen Kim. While the world may know it, the fact of the matter is that it is in the back of their minds. While there are bigger fish to fry the international community puts very serious abuses aside as has been the case with Burma too. I believe that someone as brave as the Dr. plays a vital role in ensuring these matters are not put on the back burner. Your response also jettisons all sense of morality (and I am well aware there is little or none in international relations); ‘yeah, we know it’s wrong, but we have to deal with a dictator’.
However, I find your assertion that it is unwanted foreign meddling mildly galling inasmuch as the problem is already international in nature. Refugees are spilling into third countries, western states have been threatened by the DPRK’s nuclear weapons and are paying the bribes for KJI to dismantle them. Like it or not, the international community has a huge role to play and as such I think Dr. V serves a useful role in keeping this much ignored facet of DPRK activity in the spotlight.
“It is much better to have a peaceful process which will lead to unification in the future than to have violent war which will get a lot of people killed on both side of Korea.”
Pie in the sky. This summit will lead to unification? And who says that the alternative is war? Many of us who oppose this farce would be much happier if the South actually expected and demanded something in return for all the free goodies it gives the North. That’s why we say this stuff is appeasement, because the South gets little or nothing in return for the billions it funnels to KJI.
Your response also jettisons all sense of morality (and I am well aware there is little or none in international relations); ‘yeah, we know it’s wrong, but we have to deal with a dictator’.
I’m quite aware of the moral dimension. It seems to boil down to this: “amoral pragmatism” versus “muddled idealism”.
The discussion we’re having is an example of the tension between deontological ethics and teleological or consequential ethics (read Kurt Vonnegut’s “All the King’s Horses”).
A consequentialist (me) thinks that the rightness of an action (ie. the intra-Korea summit) is determined by the results of that action. It’s another way of saying “the ends justify the means”. A deontologist (you) thinks that the action itself determines the rightness or wrongness. The intra-Korea summit is wrong because it involves wheeling and dealing with an evil dictator and fails to press the issue of human rights (which an adherent of Kant would identify easily as a “categorical imperative”.)
Personally, to be quite frank, I’m not absolutely sure which way of thinking is really right. But we try to do the best we can, right?
The problem with your deontology is that there is an inherent paradox. In order to fulfill the moral demands of observing the categorical imperative of human rights, it involves taking actions (sanction or war) that is much worse than simply ignoring human rights. We know from past experience that sanction has little effect on North Korea. The common people bear the brunt of the hardship while the elite and the military still get their supplies via the Chinese black market. In any case, human rights are being violated anyway. Abstractions such as free speech or whatever matter very, very little when you are starving to death. Ben Franklin’s “give me liberty or give me death” and “those who seek security over freedom deserve neither freedom nor security” were merely snappy propaganda slogans to rally well-fed, 18th century white American property owners to rebel against taxation from the British Empire. They are not “universal truths” which apply to modern Korea’s own peculiar circumstances.
Consequentialism suffers from no such inner conflict. And while the future results of present-day reconciliatory efforts by the SK gov is still undetermined, the outcomes of a deontological approach to NK is well-established and known from past experience.
The primary responsibility of the SK GOV, as a government, is promoting the welfare, security, and interests of SK and the Korean peninsula. Their job is to work hard to set up conditions such that it is most conducive for NK to tilt in a favorable direction.
My biggest objection to the naysayers is that they are all criticism, puffed up on self-righteousness, but offer no viable alternatives or solution.